The State of Commercial Open Source 2026: Stars Don’t Pay the Bills

Andrea and GPS are joined by the co-authors of the annual State of Commercial Open Source report, Matt Lavergne, a partner at the VC firm Serena, and Sam Boysel, a data scientist with the Linux Foundation. 

Matt and Sam walk through what years of data on VC-backed open source startups actually show: commercial open source companies raise money faster, close bigger rounds, and exit at significantly higher valuations than their closed-source peers. They dig into which signals actually matter instead, why the fear that “money ruins open source communities” mostly doesn’t hold up in the data, and how founders can build a business on top of an existing project without alienating the people who made it valuable in the first place, including real examples like pyannoteAI and MotherDuck. Finally, they share why open source founders turned out to be surprisingly optimistic about AI’s impact on their businesses. 

Links mentioned in the episode:

Matt Lavergne on LinkedIn

Sam Boysel on LinkedIn

The State of Commercial Open Source 2026
pyannoteAI
MotherDuck
Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal

 

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